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Now, despite not really using XP (other than for encounter budgeting purposes, and occasionally figuring out roughly where characters would be levelling in a published adventure if I was going by the book), I'm not advocating for its removal/absence from the rules. There's clearly people who...

If by "everyone knows", you mean "nearly everyone gets out wrong", sure. Superman doesn't have a weakness to magic. Kryptonite weakens him, causes him pain, and can potentially kill him. Red sunlight can strip away his powers. Magic does neither of these things to him in and of itself...

Canadians don't call "Canadian bacon" ham. We call it back bacon. Nobody calls "American cheese" cheese because it'd be insulting to actual cheese (many good varieties of which are indeed produced in the US). To contribute to the actual topic ... where the metaphor falls apart for me is that...

I'm of the "level when the DM says" school of thought, and for me MMORPGs played no role in shaping that preference. I figured out that it was my preferred method through playing D&D 4E by the book and finding that (at least when using published adventures) the timing of when the characters...

I would be very surprised if the final system is significantly different in structure and major content from what we've seen so far. They'd come across as looking rather ridiculous after talking up the merits of each adjustment they've made if they went and tossed it all out and gave us...

I can't speak for anyone else, even within my own groups, but that Mearls quote doesn't fill me with hope. For me, you can't "capture the best parts of 4th Edition" (even when specifically talking about the tactical aspects of combat) by providing a tacked-on tactical module that presents...

This left me scratching my head. Why would an illusionist suck in combat? Oh sure, they might have low HP, lousy armour, and not be terribly good at sticking the pointy end of something into the other fellow, but the ability to alter the enemy's perception of the situation is a devastatingly...

Mark me down as another in favour of "Multiple Options", including "Write your own". See, I fall on pretty near the opposite side of the spectrum from Kamikaze Midget here. Were I to have my druthers, rather than he his, you'd see something more along these lines: Restoring HP should be...

The thing about Balance Over Time—regardless of whether that timeframe is a 30-level span, 20-level span, a campaign, an adventure, or any other arbitrary division of time longer than a single session of play—is that it fails to actually achieve balance over any time other than the span it was...

I like the idea of ritual magic in fantasy settings. What I do not like, I find, is the implementations of it used in 4E and Next. Neither manage to capture the concept in a way that satisfies me. In 4E, ritual magic is locked behind the wall of the Ritual Caster feat. You need to invest...

Well, the summer 2014 timing comes as a surprise to pretty much nobody anywhere. I imagine that "multiple gaming platforms" bit is going to inspire some … interesting reactions.

Is he from Venice?

Even if you exclude the unremarkable, there's still potential high-school clique backgrounds that merit just as much mechanical weight as 'jock'. Theatre students, dance students, art students, music students, etc. Beyond that, you do have a generic 'college' career later, so if that's...

I realize the list is not complete, but not knowing what's planned to be added, I'll comment on one gap that immediately caught my attention. You may want to consider a few more high-school related options in that starter grouping. My high-school experience (and I'd suspect most other people's)...

6th Edition is so yesterday. It's all about 12th Edition now. Or is it 13th?

One cannot 'balance one spell' in isolation. Balance requires at least two things to be compared. Trying to balance a spell in isolation is like trying to balance an old-fashioned set of scales while only placing anything on one side. You need a baseline, a spell that establishes the desired...

It should be noted that classic D&D names like Greyhawk, Blackmarsh, Dragonlance and Ravenloft all follow this apparently '4E' compound naming convention. It should also be noted that, if translated from their Latin/pseudo-Latin/Latinized Greek forms into English, many of the 'proper'...

To truly start from scratch, with a fresh slate, would mean abandoning any game mechanic that had ever appeared in any edition of the game before. Toss out the polyhedrons. Forget classes. No more HP. AC is dead. Levels? What are those? No XP for gold, no XP for killing monsters, no XP for...

This, basically. Any living, reproducing, population that is using a method other than 100% perfect cloning (no errors, no matter how small, ever, or at least none ever allowed to be passed on to successive generations) to reproduce is evolving. It's important to keep in mind that evolution is...

If it's situational, then it's likely to be situational for the feat-user as well. And he can't choose to prepare a different feat on days where he doesn't expect to need to be sneaky. The ability to do something at-will trumps the ability to do it X times per day only to the extent that...